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When The Going Gets Good

We writers spend way too much time in the rough, staring at a blank screen, desperately trying to make words make sense, to turn those words into something that means…something. Anything. It’s a new fight every day and let’s face it, it’s exhausting. Sometimes it’s so bad we can barely crank out a few hundred words and on a REALLY bad day sometimes that blank page wins and we write absolutely nothing, spiraling into a vicious cycle of guilt and self-loathing.

But I don’t want to talk about the bad days. I want to talk about the good ones. The days we wait weeks, sometimes months for. When we know exactly where we’re going, and more importantly, why.

I had a good day today. Not great, not yet, though great writing days are as hard to come by as, oh I don’t know, unicorns? But I had a good day. After weeks of setbacks and self-doubt, after weeks of trying to find a way out of this slump, I did. I sat down, opened up that word document despite the sudden anxiety induced nausea, and I started writing. Even though everything in me wanted to stop, doubt this heavy real thing that I could taste and smell and feel. And it felt awful. Just to begin felt awful and scary and why was I doing this? And more importantly why did I keep doing it every day?

But a few hundred words of absolute garbage in and I remembered the answer to that question. And to every question that keeps me up at night when all I can think about are the things I didn’t do that day. I remembered this–that without words, without writing, I would know nothing, I would feel nothing and I would be nothing. Without writing there’s no way I’d be able to live in this world and have it make sense. The world makes sense when I write. Everything makes sense when I write. And on a good day I don’t just make sense of the world but I learn to live in it and sometimes, when the going gets really good, I make the even more amazing discovery that the world isn’t this big scary place but a beautiful one.